Oil: Find in a Treacherous Sea

These days big new oil discoveries seem to be turning up everywhere—on the North Slope of Alaska, in western Siberia and off the shores of Indonesia. Even so, the search for oil remains a frantic race to keep up with fast-moving demand. Oil usage in the non-Communist world reached almost 36 million bbl. per day last year and is expected to rise by well over 2,000,000 this year.

Last week Phillips Petroleum Co. announced what it called a "giant" oil discovery—one with at least a billion barrels of recoverable crude—in the North Sea. The new field seems...